ECommerce and microdata
-
Last year I rolled my own online shop and I included schema.org microdata for all the products. My Google ranking continued to improve during that period, but I was doing a number of improvements, so I can't say how much was due to the microdata.
My store continues to grow so I moved to an eCommerce solution. I opted to go with Volusion. Much to my surprise, about the only SEO feature they have implemented is SEO friendly URLs. They have not implemented microdata, which is pretty surprising given that all their sites are geared towards products. I would think it would be very easy for them to span the product name, description, price, etc, with a product schema.
I called CoreCommerce, a Volusion competitor, and they have not implemented microdata either.
Why are these large eCommerce providers ignoring microdata?
Are there eCommerce solutions that have implemented microdata?
Do large online retailers like Amazon and Buy use microdata?
Is there any data that shows the SEO benefits of implementing microdata for an online store?
Best,
Christopher -
Amazing! The question from Christopher was posted in 2012. 2 years later, Volusion still seem to be running years behind as far as online marketing goes. They have a reasonably good system for building an ecommerce website, but when it comes to online marketing, they struggle.
- They have still not implemented Microdata for products.
- Not only that but their Google Shopping Feed has to be Manually published, instead of allowing the feed to get updated periodically, like daily etc.
- They do not support all the latest fields and attribute details that Google Merchant centre now offer such as Mobile Links, Attribute Lengths
- Making Availability mandatory (which was enforced September 30, 2014)
- and so much more.
For Basic ecommerce the Volusion product seems great. As soon as you wish to really start utilising resources outside Volusion, Good Luck!
-
Amazon uses Schema with their products. We use product Schema on our eCommerce sites. My belief is that it will help from a rich snippets pov and simply that this is something the search engines want. The best way to get people to adopt is to show that it helps. That's my opinion anyway.
Best,
-
Thanks for the info and the link to the testing tool.
To be fair, I should add that Volusion has added rich snippets for reviews, and that's certainly a step in the right direction. However, companies rolling out a new shop typically have products and no reviews, so the product snippets could be used from day one if they were implemented.
I did come up with a hack to add a schema.org description to each of my products. I'll continue to look for a hack that allows me to put meta data around all product features like price and availability, but product description will have to do for now.
Best,
Christopher -
I don't have answers to all of your questions but I might be able to shed a little light on them.
I've not seen any major studies that show the benefit of microdata specifically on rankings. However when you look at the area of rich snippets for eCommerce as a whole then I have it on good authority (but haven't seen the data myself) that you can expect an increased CTR from having some forms of rich snippet. Whether you implement that change using microdata, microformats or RDFa is irrelevant. Here's one study I found.
I would hazard a guess that many eCommerce providers appear to be a little slow to implement microdata into their product because although Schema.org has been live for over a year microdata has only provided any tangible benefit in Google since April 2012 when Google updated rich snippets for products.
If you want to find out if a specific retail is using semantic data (again not just microdata in this case) then just take their product page URLs and paste them into the rich snippets testing tool.
Hope that helps a little.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ecommerce Category Pages
First, let's define the terminology for the various types of ecommerce pages. The terminology differs from organization to organization: Product Description Pages (PDPs): These pages have a single product, pricing, an "add to cart" button, reviews, and a product description. Product Listing Pages (PLPs): These are product category/subcategory pages that have product image links and text links to Product Description Pages (PDPs). Category Pages: These pages have subcategory image and text links to subcategory pages. No product images are displayed Hybrid Category Pages: these pages combine sub-Category Images and text at the top of the page and product listings below. Our CMS currently does not allow us to create hybrids. This conversation revolves primarily around mobile. Our ecommerce team is having discussions around the appropriate use of PLPs vs Category pages. After doing a quick audit of the mobile sites of some top ecommerce players, there is definitely a trend to use Category Pages at the top of the category and sub-category hierarchy and use PLPs at the very bottom. The logic from a usability perspective is to allow visitors to navigate a site without ever using the hamburger navigation. ex: Baby (Category Page) => Car Seats (Category Page) => Convertible Car Seats (PLP) The sites I audited all had hamburger menus. A visitor would navigate from a home page image for "Baby," an image on the "Baby" page to "Car Seats", and an image on the "Car Seats" page to the Convertible Car Seats page. At that point, they would be able to shop for "Convertible Car Seats" on a PLP. This appears to be excellent UX and easy to use navigation. Theoretically, good for SEO as well. In short, category and subcategory pages are being used as navigation to allow visitors to easily navigate to the bottom of the hierarchy and shop on the most narrow page in the hierarchy. Much easier to use than a hamburger menu, but it does entail more clicks. The discussion revolves around allowing users to shop for product at a higher level in the taxonomy. For example, what if a visitor wants to shop all Car Seats? In the above taxonomy, we are precluding users from shopping in this manner. There is no "Car Seats" PLP. Our CMS has the ability to create both a Category Page and a PLP for "Car Seats". We could theoretically place an image on the "Car Seats" category page for "View All Car Seats", and allow users to click to a "Car Seats" PLP. None of the major ecommerce players I've audited are adding a PLP option higher up in the hierarchy. That doesn't mean that it's not good UX. Problems: From an SEO perspective, having a Category Page and a PLP for "Car Seats" would cause cannibalization - they would be competing for the same keywords. I am skeptical that canonicals would work. The pages are not near duplicate content. One page has category images, the other has product images. We could place content blocks on the page to make them more similar. We could noindex the PLP, but that's a waste of internal link juice. Need advice: Will canonicals work in this situation? Should we trash this idea entirely? Does adding a PLP add value or confusion? Is noindex a good idea? Is there an option to target keyword variations with the PLP? Is there another solution?
Web Design | | Satans_Apprentice0 -
Best practices for ecommerce product categories?
I'm trying to optimise my ecommerce site's category/navigation structure so that it is: Intuitive for human users Keyword optimised, and Minimises duplicate content penalties Here is my dilemma. Let's say my site sells widgets. Some people search for widgets according to size (big widgets, medium widgets) while others search according to colour (green widgets, blue widgets). My keyword research suggests that I should target some keywords that relate to size, others that relate to colour, yet others relating to material, etc. I figured that I'd use one of these taxonomies as a category system, then set the others as filter elements. So my site's main navigation would say "Big Widgets | Medium Widgets | Small Widgets". If you click on any of them, or if you click on the "Widgets" supercategory, you'd reach a filter function allowing you to see only green widgets, or only plastic widgets, etc. So far so good - from a user perspective. The problem with this method is that Google isn't going to index my filter results. So someone Googling "green widgets" or "plastic widgets" is unlikely to find my site, even though I have plenty of green/plastic widgets that they could have filtered for. My next thought was to add some of these filter urls to my main navigation so they will be crawled. My filter mod generates urls for each filter (eg mysite.com/category?filter=k39;w24). So now I have a flashier navigation menu where clicking "Widgets" will pop out a panel allowing you to browse by size or by colour. I don't know whether users will find this helpful or redundant/confusing, but at least Google can see my filter urls. But I've run into two more problems. My filter results aren't really pages, so I can't set things like H1s, meta descriptions and so on. There's very little I can do to keyword optimise them. Further, I now have duplicate content, because the same widget can show up under multiple filter urls. And so I'm stuck here. I've thought about creating custom pages for each target keyword and manually listing products that pertain to each keyword. This will allow me to optimise the pages, but it's a lot of ongoing work (I have to update them whenever I get new stock), and I'm not sure my visitors will appreciate this - I suspect they would rather just browse/filter/search through my site than have to click through pages of manual curated content. I'd appreciate any thoughts or advice on figuring out my category and navigation system!
Web Design | | peekpeeka0 -
Need help to implement microdata/microformat for ecommerce site
**Can somebody please help me to implement microdata/microformats codes for our ecommerce product pages? **
Web Design | | EastEssence22
Please guide me if you have some CSS example for the same. Thanks.0 -
Solutions for too many links on page (Ecommerce)?
Hello Mozzers, Most Ecommerce websites I've come across have four main link sections - Main Nav - About, Contact etc Side Nav - List of Categories + Products Footer - Useful links etc Promotional Area - Promoting Best sellers / Latest products This ends up totalling anything from 200 to 500 links. I was wondering is there a reasonable solution to hide some of the links? Or should I just ignore the warning? Thanks, Dan
Web Design | | Sparkstone0 -
Infinite Scrolling vs. Pagination on an eCommerce Site
My company is looking at replacing our ecommerce site's paginated browsing with a Javascript infinite scroll function for when customers view internal search results--and possibly when they browse product categories also. Because our internal linking structure isn't very robust, I'm concerned that removing the pagination will make it harder to get the individual product pages to rank in the SERPs. We have over 5,000 products, and most of them are internally linked to from the browsing results pages in the category structure: e.g. Blue Widgets, Widgets Under $250, etc. I'm not too worried about removing pagination from the internal search results pages, but I'm concerned that doing the same for these category pages will result in de-linking the thousands of product pages that show up later in the browsing results and therefore won't be crawlable as internal links by the Googlebot. Does anyone have any ideas on what to do here? I'm already arguing against the infinite scroll, but we're a fairly design-driven company and any ammunition or alternatives would really help. For example, would serving a different page to the Googlebot in this case be a dangerous form of cloaking? (If the only difference is the presence of the pagination links.) Or is there any way to make rel=next and rel=prev tags work with infinite scrolling?
Web Design | | DownPour0 -
Ecommerce Style Wordpress But No Shopping Cart.
Wondering if anyone knows if you can purchase an ecommece style wordpress theme, but not use the shopping cart portion or display pricing. We would like to display our website how an ecommerce is set up, but at this time, we do not sell anything online. We are considering in the near future to sell half of our products. And this would not be very large. Or can ecommerce be added to any wordpress theme. ?
Web Design | | hfranz0 -
Which ecommerce platform is best for SEO?
We currently run our eyewear store on osCommerce. However, for various reasons we are considering a redevelopment onto another platform, the most obvious choice being Magento. What might the advantage and improvement in SEO with such a change and is the pain worth the gain???
Web Design | | seanmccauley0 -
Ecommerce web site with too many internal links
Hi, We're using Magento CE 1.4.0.1 for our ecommerce web site with a fairly flat navigation system i.e. 9 major categories display across the top menu that when you roll over display 2-20 sub categories (which take you to a groups of similar products) and then individual product pages. The categories and sub categories are available to click on as part of a dynamic Html menu system on each page. Each page also shows a small number of related products. This linking structure seems fairly standard and yet Seomoz throws up the error message, "Too Many On-page links" for most pages on our site. Do I need to really worry about this? Is there much can be done to improve this on an ecommerce web site with a large catalogue of products? I've looked at the Knowledge Base but I don't feel the existing responses adequately address the issue for ecommerce sites.
Web Design | | languedoc0